Great Throughts Treasury

"And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see us in its own past. If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to build its first city wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop; that Rome labored in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan King anchored it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of today, who feast us with their mild cheeses and apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune, as late as the Sixteenth Century. Even at the height of the Renaissance, twelve thousand lansquenets in the pay of the imperial armies sacked and devastated Rome and put eight thousands of its inhabitants to the sword."

"And I felt myself sinking into the quicksand delight of tenderness."

"'And in the meantime?’ asked the Marquis. Meanwhile, said Abrenuncio, tóquenle music, fill the house with flowers, birds do sing, take her to see the sunsets at sea, give all you can make her happy. They fired a volley hat in the air and rigor Latin sentence. But this time in honor of the Marquis translated: There is no medicine to cure what happiness does not cure"

"And it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love but without the problems of love."

"And nevertheless, when they watched him leave the house, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return. That was their life. Love, if it existed, was something separate: another life."

"And love. Nothing is more difficult than love."

"And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remember, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice. And when you do find one, observe with care, he said to the intern: they almost always have crystals in their heart."

"And taught him the only thing he had to learn about love: that nobody teaches life anything."

"And realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality."

"And that in any place where they were always remember that the past was a lie, that memory had no back roads, that any old spring was unrecoverable, and that love was more foolish and stubborn truth anyway ephemeral."

"And the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders."

"And the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again."

"And they left to die of hunger and love the bedroom."

"And without giving him time to panic was released from the turbid matter that prevented him from living. He confessed that he had a moment without thinking about it, that the eating and drinking had the taste of her life was her all the time and everywhere, as only God had the right and the power to be, and that the supreme joy of his heart would die with her."

"Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator who went with Magellan on the first voyage around the world, wrote, upon his passage through our southern lands of America, a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy. In it he recorded that he had seen hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel's body, the legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse. He described how the first native encountered in Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that impassioned giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image."

"And when there was in each dish an equal dose of Defense Minister stuffed with pine nuts and herbs he gave the order to start, good advantage, gentlemen."

"Anyway, the whole purpose of what I just said was to put you on the defensive."

"Are you not afraid of being lost?"

"Around the time they were preparing Jose Arcadio for the seminary she had already made a detailed recapitulation of life in the house since the founding of Macondo and had completely changed the opinion that she had always had of its descendants. She realized that Colonel Aureliano Buendia had not lost his love for the family because he had been hardened by the war, as she had thought before, but that he had never loved anyone... Amaranta, however, whose hardness of heart frightened her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter, suddenly became clear to her in the final analysis as the most tender woman who had ever existed, and she understood with pitying clarity that the unjust tortures to which she had submitted Pietro Crespi had not been dictated by a desire for vengeance, as everyone had thought, nor had the slow martyrdom with which she had frustrated the life of Colonel Gerineldo Marquez been determined by the gall of her bitterness, as everyone had thought, but that both actions had been a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice, and that the irrational fear that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the end. It was during that time that Ursula began to speak Rebecca's name, bringing back the memory of her with an old love that was exalted by tardy repentance and a sudden admiration, coming to understand that only she, Rebecca, the one who had never fed of her milk but only of the earth of the land and the whiteness of the walls... Rebecca, the one with an impatient heart, the one with a fierce womb, was the only one who had the unbridled courage that Ursula had wanted for her line."

"Aren't you afraid you will be damned?' 'I believe I already am, but not by the Holy Spirit,' said Delaura without alarm. 'I have always believed He attributes more importance to love than to faith."

"Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia."

"As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance."

"As I hear him, I understand that he's not more moronic because of the brandy than he is because of his cowardice."

"Asked: How long do you think that we will be able to continue this coming and going cursed? Answer was ready: I Florentino Aretha since the fifty-three years and six months and a ten days and nights, he said: a lifetime."

"At first he told them that everything was just the same, that the pink snails were still in the house where he had been born, that the dry herring still had the same taste on a piece of toast, that the waterfalls in the village still took on a perfumed smell at dusk. They were the notebook pages again, woven with the purple scribbling, in which he dedicated a special paragraph to each one. Nevertheless, and although he himself did not seem to notice it, those letters of recuperation and stimulation were slowly changing into pastoral letters of disenchantment. One winter night while the soup was boiling in the fireplace, he missed the heat of the back of his store, the buzzing of the sun on the dusty almond trees, the whistle of the train during the lethargy of siesta time, just as in Macondo he had missed the winter soup in the fireplace, the cries of the coffee vendor, and the fleeting larks of springtime. Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught then about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end."

"At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point."

"At the end of so many years of sterile illusions had begun to surmise that you do not live, fuck, you survive, you learn too late that even the most extensive and useful lives are not sufficient to simply learn to live."

"Aureliano not only understood by then, he also lived his brother’s experiences as something of his own, for on one occasion when the latter was explaining in great detail the mechanism of love, he interrupted him to ask: What does it feel like? José Arcadio gave an immediate reply: It’s like an earthquake."

"At twelve o’clock, when Aureli-ano, José had bled to death and Carmelita Montiel found that the cards showing her future were blank, more than four hundred men had filed past the theater and discharged their revolvers into the abandoned body of Captain Aquiles Ricardo. A patrol had to use a wheelbarrow to carry the body, which was heavy with lead and fell apart like a water-soaked loaf of bread."

"Aureliano Segundo was deep in the reading of a book. Although it had no cover and the title did not appear anywhere, the boy enjoyed the story of a woman who sat at a table and ate nothing but kernels of rice, which she picked up with a pin, and the story of the fisherman who borrowed a weight for his net from a neighbor and when he gave him a fish in payment later it had a diamond in its stomach, and the one about the lamp that fulfilled wishes and about flying carpets. Surprised, he asked Ursula if all that was true and she answered him that it was, that many years ago the gypsies had brought magic lamps and flying mats to Macondo."

"At dawn, worn out by the tormented vigil, he appeared in the cell an hour before the execution. "The farce is over, old friend," he said to Colonel Gerineldo Marquez. "Let's get out of here before the mosquitos in here execute you." Colonel Gerineldo Marquez could not express the disdain that was inspired in him by that attitude. "No, Aureliano," he replied. "I'd rather be dead than see you changed into a tyrant." "You won't see me," Colonel Aureliano Buendía said. "Put your shoes and help me get this shitty war over with." When he said it he did not know that it was easier to start a war than to end one."

"Aureliano Segundo went back into the house with his trunks, convinced that not only Ursula, but also all the inhabitants of Macondo were waiting for the rain to die. He had seen them, going, sitting in the living with the rapt attention and crossed arms, intent on hearing spend an entire time, a time not tamed, because it was useless to divide it in months and years, hours and days, if you could not help but contemplate the Rain"

"Ausensiya Santander turned it around a person and perverse wisdom of an old dog, and set it up several times upside down upside down, transforming it to such an extent as if born again, broken into pieces theoretical and showed his virtuosity Florentino Ariza is all I need to know about love: that nobody can teach life."

"Be calm. God awaits you at the door."

"Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it, he said with deep bitterness. I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch."

"Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment"

"Before returning home the next day I wrote on the mirror with lipstick: My child, we are alone in the world."

"Before that, my life was always agitated by a tangle of tricks, feints and illusions intended to outwit the countless lures that tried to turn me into anything but a writer."

"Beginning with Oedipus, I've always been interested in plagues. I have studied a lot about medieval plagues."

"Because for you, quitting smoking would be like killing someone you love."

"Because he had not done what she, with her heart in her mouth, had hoped he would do, which was to be a man: deny everything, and swear on his life it was not true, and grow indignant at the false accusation, and shout curses at this ill-begotten society that did not hesitate to trample on one's honor, and remain imperturbable even when forced with crushing proofs of his disloyalty."

"Become a better person, and make sure you're aware of yourself before you meet someone in the hope that he will understand what kind of person you are."

"Because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth"

"Before adolescence, memory is more interested in the future than the past."

"Before I could read or write I used to draw comics at school and at home. The funny thing is that I now realize that when I was in high school I had the reputation of being a writer, though I never in fact wrote anything. If there was a pamphlet to be written or a letter of petition, I was the one to do it because I was supposedly the writer."

"Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room."

"Blood circulated through her veins with the fluidity of a song that branched off into the most hidden areas of her body and returned to her heart, purified by love. Before I left at dawn I drew the lines of her hand on a piece of paper and gave it to Diva Sahibí for a reading so I could know her soul."

"Believed to be happy, and maybe they were, until one of them said a word more or less took a step, and the night was rotting in a lawsuit of vandals who demoralized the dogs."

"Between the covers of the books that no one had ever read again, in the old parchments damaged by dampness, a livid flower had prospered, and in the air that had been the purest and brightest in the house an unbearable smell of rotten memories floated."

"Both found while there was always March and always was Monday, and then realized that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family had but it was the only one who had had enough lucidity to glimpse the truth that also time suffered setbacks and accidents and could therefore splinter and leave a fraction immortalized quarter."